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Hi all, I'm not sure whether this should go under blogs. I wanted someplace to generate some awareness and feedback for a project I have become involved in. I am the lead animator on a steam-punk fighting game called GildenTide. We've been influenced by the Skull Girls project to create an American fighting game. The differences between Skull Girls and us is that we wanted to create something that is uniquely western. For years now, the mechanics and development process secrets have been coveted and perfected by Japanese developers, and our goal is to make an American statement and show that the American fighting game community can contribute to the genre. So we've decided to make the setting in 19th century steam-punk England with a fantastic cast of characters which haven't been seen in the fighting game genre. We've decided to forgo 2D graphics but stick with 2-dimensional gameplay a la Street Fighter IV with mechanics influenced by the Street Fighter Alpha series. We're currently working with GGPO to port over their network code to C# for our (and future) projects.
We've recently just got off the ground and launched a Kickstarter page. Since founding the Kickstarter we've been featured on Kotaku and SRK. We also have a Wordpress Blog which is going to be featuring weekly updates from the art team and possibly programming updates once the ball gets rolling. So if you're interested in competitive fighting games check us out. Please, comment here (or on the aforementioned sites) and let me know if you have any [constructive] criticism. I created this thread not for a money beg (which is why I've refrained from posting the Kickstarter link), but to get some honest feedback and see if there is interest in such a game.
 
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Good luck. Are you a fighting game nut? IIRC, the Skullgirls team were pretty deep enthusiasts.
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Thanks! I myself am not a huge fighting game nerd (though I definitely play them). However, the project has been birthed by several members of the Orlando community who are pretty hardcore players. From what I've read of the design documents, our lead definitely has a deep understanding of fighters and balance, so calling him an enthusiast might be an understatement.
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wow gl to u guys and props man. never played alpha series (was more into 3s back then, and now primarily compete in just sf4, 3s still, and kof13, while watching the rest of the currently popular games aka. marvel3), but i did catch competitive play at the most recent major i attended (nec) and even i was hype/excited watching those alpha matches. plus it's always fun watching/playing a new game, especially one done by a group of ppl dedicated and interested in the community (skullgirls crew and now u guys n.n)
skullgirls seems interesting, and from what i've seen/heard its the closest thing to mvc2 so should be good. i'll be keep a close eye on this thou!
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The name needs to be changed to something more memetic.
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The kicks for the male character look terrible, his weight is set up wrong at the start for a kick so in reality they would be super awkward and have no force....looks more like a leg lift than a kick.
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Thanks for the feedback guys.
On January 08 2012 18:18 sob3k wrote:
The kicks for the male character look terrible, his weight is set up wrong at the start for a kick so in reality they would be super awkward and have no force....looks more like a leg lift than a kick.
Hi, thanks, honestly. My only defense at this point is that these are very rough animations. If it looks like he's just lifting his leg, that's essentially what he's doing right now. These aren't finished animations, and I promise it will have to look bad an awful lot before it looks good. The process I'm going through is to cut up the reference video into key frames that I'm bringing into my 3D package (Maya). These animations are just essentially these "key frames" posed with Maya's interpolation applied to the animations, with little editing to the animation curves. The issue of him having no force may be true. The actor in the reference video intentionally made the kick awkward and sloppy as Otto's character is primarily a brawler with no martial arts training who relies on his brass gauntlets to get the job done.
The process looks like this,
Reference video -> key frames from poses in the reference video brought into maya -> model animated solely based on poses from the video key frames -> lots of iteration -> *once character is brought into engine* Go back and try to match the animations to the fame budget. -> once animations are within frame budget, exaggerate and emphasize key poses to add more impact to the strikes. -> balance begins with the designers, who take the animations in engine and modify speeds/frame count of the animations while drawing hit boxes. Particle effects are also added to the characters, like hit sparks and steam. -> complete.
The bolded is where I'm at right now, so there's definitely a lot of room for improvement and a long ways to go. If you're interested keep on the lookout, because new iterations on the animations will be posted this Monday with some of the issues already fixed.
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One of the things you're harping on in this post is the idea of the Japanese being secretive and having a monopoly, and a US team wanting to contribute something innovative. But from the looks of the source material and the articles on other sites it just sounds like they want to make a steampunk game with heavy influence from existing Japanese games. And considering how entrenched in British aesthetics you want this game to ultimately be, I'd tone down the goofy patriotism stuff.
Apart from that it's hard to give constructive criticism seeing as how the project is in an early stage. The mockups and models look pretty good. Trust a game project to start with the logo and go from there, right?
I've never worked with or played a game built on the Unity engine so I'm not sure what kinds of issues you'll run into or whether or not you can expect everything to run smoothly. C# is managed code afterall so be careful with the algorithms you're writing. You'll need to have someone on board who really knows what the difficulties are, not just someone who has picked up the language for fun.
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On January 09 2012 01:31 lolmlg wrote:
One of the things you're harping on in this post is the idea of the Japanese being secretive and having a monopoly, and a US team wanting to contribute something innovative. But from the looks of the source material and the articles on other sites it just sounds like they want to make a steampunk game with heavy influence from existing Japanese games. And considering how entrenched in British aesthetics you want this game to ultimately be, I'd tone down the goofy patriotism stuff.
Apart from that it's hard to give constructive criticism seeing as how the project is in an early stage. The mockups and models look pretty good. Trust a game project to start with the logo and go from there, right?
I've never worked with or played a game built on the Unity engine so I'm not sure what kinds of issues you'll run into or whether or not you can expect everything to run smoothly. C# is managed code afterall so be careful with the algorithms you're writing. You'll need to have someone on board who really knows what the difficulties are, not just someone who has picked up the language for fun.
Well, we're not quite aiming for innovative mechanics wise, we're strongly influenced by Japanese fighting games. We're going for a western feel with the theme and art style, something that hasn't been seen. Even Skull Girls is essentially more of the same anime characters fighting each other. So yes, you're right, we're definitely aware that our roots are firmly in the Japanese fighting game genre, and that's what we want to make our contribution in.
Yeah, honestly I wish we had more to show. I came on fairly late, and the lead wanted the kickstater launched on the twenty-eighth.
Our programmers are not casual programmers, believe me. We've gone through a couple of programmers to find ones who are serious, but one is one of the best programmers I've ever met. We've heard through the grapevine that Skull Girls had to go through an awful lot of programmers before they settled on Mike Z who is apparently a genius. So we're going to try and see how things work out, and hopefully not end up in too much trouble, but our goal is first alpha build by the CEO tournament.
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Looks like a cool project. Good luck with it and getting the proper funding.
Steampunk has definitely been on the rise in popularity. I know Seattle has a steampunk convention, so perhaps you can prod businesses and people from that area for support (I recommending checking out www.afktavern.com and seeing if they'll spread the word for you).
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EPT
